Then when did the service’s name morph from “Status/Stat.us” to “twittr” to Twitter?

The working name was just „Status“ for a while. It actually didn’t have a name. We were trying to name it, and mobile was a big aspect of the product early on … We liked the SMS aspect, and how you could update from anywhere and receive from anywhere.

We wanted to capture that in the name — we wanted to capture that feeling: the physical sensation that you’re buzzing your friend’s pocket. It’s like buzzing all over the world. So we did a bunch of name-storming, and we came up with the word „twitch,“ because the phone kind of vibrates when it moves. But „twitch“ is not a good product name because it doesn’t bring up the right imagery. So we looked in the dictionary for words around it, and we came across the word „twitter,“ and it was just perfect. The definition was „a short burst of inconsequential information,“ and „chirps from birds.“ And that’s exactly what the product was.

The whole bird thing: bird chirps sound meaningless to us, but meaning is applied by other birds. The same is true of Twitter: a lot of messages can be seen as completely useless and meaningless, but it’s entirely dependent on the recipient. So we just fell in love with the word. It was like, „Oh, this is it.“ We can use it as a verb, as a noun, it fits with so many other words. If you get too many messages you’re „twitterpated“ — the name was just perfect.

But you needed that short code -– in order to operate SMS you need the short code to operate with this cellular administration. So we were trying to get „twttr“ — because we could just take out the vowels and get the 5-digit code. But unfortunately Teen People had that code -– it was ‘txttp’ [Text TP]. So we just decided to get an easy-to-remember short code [40404], and put the vowels back in.

So Twitter was it, and it’s been a big part of our success. Naming something and getting the branding right is really important.